Slowly migrating to KDE4

Recently the debate about KDE4 has reemerged with a lot of people complaining heavily – either their pet feature is not yet (re-)implemented, or they don’t agree with some fringe design decision, or something else is not exactly the way they like it. I could understand people had mixed feelings about 4.0, but now it’s getting out of hand in my opinion, while 4.1 won’t match KDE 3.5 in every possible respect, the improvements during the six months since 4.0 release are incredible – very promising prospects for 4.2 and I don’t even dare think about 4.3 – oohwee.

I’ve been running KDE 4.0 on my ancient Pentium III Compaq bricktop, since before it was released, and recently upgraded to 4.1 beta. I’ve also just played my first songs with Amarok2 on it, had a look at K3b and KOffice2, things are rapidly approaching a usable level. But this doesn’t really count as migration, as I rarely use this bricktop, and almost never do anything remotely productive on it.

I’ll definitely complete migration to KDE 4.1.x for my workstation when openSUSE 11.1 is released in December this year – at the very latest. Being a huge fan of KDE3 I’ll surely miss it, but there’s no use in clinging to the past – for the good of KDE and the free software desktop in general, it’s getting time to move on.

So far I’ve begun a slow, gradual migration of my workstation, from within safe and familiar KDE3 – moving to KDE4 components one step at a time.

I’m using KDE4.1 beta KWin with effects enabled (yes, in KDE3. seli made this very easy to do). I could never get along with Compiz for more than a few minutes at the time, but now I’ve used kde4-kwin for more than a week, virtually without a single issue. While it doesn’t have as many or as extravagant effects as Comiz, it does have the useful ones (scale windows, desktop-grid and such) and also wobbly windows and some pretty switchers.

I’ve also begun using a number of the great KDE4 applications as defaults for their respective jobs – using Okular for PDFs, KDE4 Gwenview for image viewing, using LoKalize for translations, Dragon Player for video, KTorrent, Marble, KDE Games… steadily adding more KDE4 apps to the bunch. Of course I’m using Oxygen icon theme for YaST2 and Firefox

I’m lovin’ it…

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4 Responses

I’ve been running KDE4 as my only DE since 4.0.1, and I agree: it’s matured a lot. I’m currently running 4.0.84 from Suse 11’s factory, and it works great although with a few regressions from 4.0.x but the devs knows about them so I’m confident they will be fixed in time for 4.1.final (the desktop grid works only partially for example).

The biggest gripe I have as of now is that some of my fav programs are at best in late alpha…Amarok, K3B and Digikam being the most obvious ones and in Amarok’s and K3B’s case they are so far next to useless…but hey, that’s to be expected of alphas.

Then again…the latest KDE3 version of K3B seems to be broken too. It refuses to recognize (and use) what kind of disc is in the drive – a problem neither Nero or Brasero has. Feels kinda odd that Gnome programs (and one proprietary at that) work better in KDE than a KDE native one…

Oh, and a tip: there’s a better way of getting Oxygen icons in firefox. Better because it works for every gtk-app you happen to have (in my case, Firefox, Gimp, Brasero, and Nero). Make sure gtk-qt-engine is installed (available in factory/community). It “translates” gtk-icons into using whatever you have set as your icon theme in KDE.

Now I only need to get that damn kgtk-wrapper to compile properly so I can get rid of the nasty gtk-fileselector…